Today was a rough day. From about midnight last night until about 5 this afternoon, I was without a phone. No texts, no calls, no browsing, and most painfully, no games at all. It was awful. However, one of the good things about my particular phone is that my problem was a relatively easy, inexpensive fix for my problem. I paid a company $50 and they came out, got my phone, repaired it, and brought it to me. (I can’t recommend Phone Falcon enough for folks in the Louisville area.) The only thing that stopped me from replacing the part myself is the fact that my phone case is impossible to open without specialty tools. That might be changing.

Google has been working for years on Project Ara, a pie-in-the-sky idea for a modular smartphone. Meaning, if you want a better camera, you buy it and put it on your phone. If you want different speakers or a different screen, or a new battery, you simply pop off the old part and replace it with the module you purchased. The smartphone frame itself is the central piece, but it can be augmented in any number of cool ways. Even better, it’s being moved from Google’s skunkworks to actual production!

“It will be thin, it will be light, it will be beautiful, and we’ll launch it next year,” said Google’s Richard Woolridge at the company’s yearly IO developers’ conference.

It’s always interesting to see a company joining a field, rather than innovating a field. Sometimes it works; Apple’s iPhone and iPad are good examples of a company entering an existing field and taking it over by making superior products or via better marketing. Sometimes it doesn’t work; Microsoft Zune, anyone? Still, there can never be too much competition, and Google has decided that it’s going to lock horns with Amazon directly. Google has revealed a voice-responsive digital assistant for the home.

The AI, Google Assistant, comes built into Google’s new device, Google Home. Basically, it works the same was as Amazon’s Echo, but with a little more capacity for suggestions. Google Assistant is going to be packaged with Google’s new chat app, Allo, and Google’s new video chat app Duo. Google Home also connects with your television via a dongle, to your smartphone, and to the cloud to play music once you yell out that you’d like to hear some AC/DC or whatever.

No doubt these new features will push the Echo to respond in kind, which benefits everyone. The more features the better, and the more the merrier when it comes to pushing the limits of what a device can do.

“We think of it as a conversational assistant, having an ongoing two-way dialogue with Google,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during Google I/O. “We want to get things done in the real world. Think of this as building each user his own individual Google.”

When I went to Paris in high school, we went to the Louvre. I say went to, not went inside. Taking a look at the line to get in, which meant a wait of several hours, and I decided that my time would be better spent elsewhere. So I believe, if memory serves, that I walked around the city, found a place to have lunch, and took in the actual feel of Paris, rather than waiting in line to walk past the Mona Lisa and not take any pictures of it. I don’t regret it, because my terrible little 1998 point-and-shoot camera wouldn’t do anything to capture the majesty of a beautiful classic painting, but Google can pick up that mantle and run with it.

Google is using a gigapixel camera called Art Cam to scan and upload paintings. These aren’t just high resolution pictures; these are pictures so high resolution that you can see individual brush strokes, the pinpoint dots of pointilism paintings, and the very ridges where paint was applied heavier or lighter. This robotic camera does all of that automatically, making life a lot easier for art snobs and allowing people to view art’s biggest hits from the privacy of their web browser.

Google is pretty cool. When you think about it, they’re basically one of the big reasons why the Internet is everywhere, and why other search engines might as well not exist. Google has a lot of fun features, and a lot of them are going undiscovered. Here are seven Google features that you might not be using.

I use Google all the time to help me track the calories in my food, and I also use it to translate the occasional piece of foreign language when I come across it. However, I had no idea that Google Sky was a thing, and now that I know about it, I’m definitely going to use it to explore the solar system. It also provides a lot of different looks from a lot of different sources, which is very useful.

I also had no idea that Google would keep a timer for me, because had I known that, I wouldn’t be forgetting to take my lunch on time, or forgetting how long my tea has been steeping, or any number of things that I completely mess up on a regular basis. That’s definitely going to be something that’ll be useful going forward, no question about it.

One of my favorite online games of all time isn’t World of Warcraft or Words With Friends or anything of the sort, it’s a pretty simple little puzzle game where you connect groups of matching shapes to rack up points and beat levels. It’s a whole lot of fun if you’ve never played it, and if you’ve never played it, you’re in luck. Bejeweled is back for Android and Apple smartphones. Best of all, it’s free.

Of course, it’s free with optional microtransactions, but you actually don’t have to buy anything to have fun, because the lives are pretty generous. It’s called Bejewled Stars, and it’s perfectly set up for smartphone players, who have to put the game down suddenly every now and then to deal with real life. Plus, if you play with your headphones on, a giant space cat meows at you every time you beat a level! Who doesn’t love cats online?

The Smart Connector, in theory, is a good idea. It’s a combination data port, power cable, and connector for devices that does pretty much everything you’d want a port to do, albeit all at the same time. It’s one of the key parts of Apple’s new line of iPad Pro. However, it may not hit everything in the upcoming generation of consumer electronics and gadgets. Apple may not be putting its new Smart Connector on the iPhone 7.

Why wouldn’t Apple put it on the iPhone 7? Well, it could be an issue of space. It could be an issue with battery position. It could be an issue with Apple’s other plan to get rid of the 3.5mm headphone jack for some sort of Lightning audio port. Maybe they just want to hold off until they roll out the iPhone 8. Maybe it’ll make the cut after all.

Either way, Apple is looking to shake things up. Last quarter was the first quarter where Apple’s iPhone sales dropped, and Apple reported its first revenue decline in 13 years.

There’s nothing worse than having to call customer service. Every time I have to call, I sit on the phone for an hour, minimum. That’s if I’m lucky. Now, if I’m somewhere where I can’t do anything else, then that’s not a huge deal, but I always have stuff that I should be doing otherwise. I’m definitely not the only person who feels that way. Indeed, there’s even a service where people will call customer service for you. GetHuman promises to call customer service on your behalf for a small fee.

“These customer service procedures have become these long obstacle courses for us,” said GetHuman CEO Christian Allen, GetHuman. “We avoid them, we procrastinate, and in some cases we don’t do them at all.”

The service has already helped 10,000 people since it launched, and there are now five full-time workers who do nothing but call customer service for people as a full-time job. GetHuman charges $5 to $25 per call, and I assume that most of the calls are $25 simply because it usually takes a lot of time to get to a human, no matter what you try to do. There are other services sprouting up to do the same thing, too; of course, most companies would rather you contact them directly, rather than go through a third party.